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5 Reasons to Prioritise Maximising Daylight in Your Next Home Design Project

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The many advantages of daylight are widely accepted by designers and researchers alike, with everything from improving productivity to positive mental wellbeing accounted for. Yet all too often, maximising daylight can be easily forgotten when designing new projects. In order to create a space that’s both practical and stylish, it’s important to understand the effect that daylit spaces can have on the property.

By understanding the many benefits of maximising daylight early on in a project, you can ensure that you are optimising the space for future use. Here, we discuss five reasons you should prioritise daylight in your next property design project.

Health Benefits

Vitamin D is essential for supporting the human bodies absorption of calcium, a key mineral in the maintenance of health bones and joints. Exposure to daylight is essential in the production of Vitamin D and a distinct lack of this vitamin can have detrimental effects, with strong links to depression, obesity, hair thinning and a decrease in energy.

Sleep Quality

The circadian system, the biological process which regulates the human sleep cycle, is directly affected by the amount of daylight one receives on a day to day basis. There are a variety of negative effects that lack of sleep can have on both productivity levels and the health of the body, making exposure to the correct light-dark cycle over 24 hours extremely important. If the cycle differs by even up to two hours, imbalances within the human sleep cycle can be caused, which can in turn produce a variety of wellbeing issues. It’s therefore absolutely necessary to have access to daylight in order to stimulate the circadian system efficiently.

Improved Productivity

After understanding the various effects daylight can have on the body, it’s perhaps unsurprising that daylight exposure can also directly impact productivity, which can also have a knock-on effect on employee satisfaction.

In more extreme cases, according to the Mental Health Foundation, approximately 1 in 15 people in the UK are affected by ‘SAD’. Also known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, ‘SAD’ often results from the lack of daylight in the winter months. Seasonal Affective Disorder can cause a variety of unpleasant and ultimately damaging effects, and often results in everything from decreased mood, productivity levels and depressive episodes.

Harvard Business review also recently published an article referencing a survey of over 1,600 employees who ranked natural daylight as one of the most important aspects of office space. Because of this, it could be implied that light generally increases mood, and therefore productivity within the office.

Increase Property Value

Due to the various benefits of daylight within homes, properties with improved daylight tend to have increased resale value. Maximised daylight comes second only to an extension in the most popular ways of increasing a property’s value, so raising the level of daylight throughout each of the rooms within a home may be well worth considering. Bi-fold doors from Quickslide are a fantastic way to optimise daylight throughout the design of a property, whilst also improving both the look and security of a house. Bi-folding doors are extremely popular on the housing market, and cost-wise it’s easy to see why, with estimations suggesting that they can add up to a further 10% onto the resale value of a property.

Conserve Energy

Energy conservation will seriously benefit from an improvement in the amount of daylight within a property. By installing larger windows or doors, daylight will be plentiful, which could result in less artificial light being required and therefore a reduction in electricity usage. Having daylight improving features, such as larger windows and bifold doors, will also mean on warmer days the sun will assist in the heating of the property, again reducing the amount of electricity or gas required. By considering minimising energy consumption within the design of the property, in turn the property’s value can increase further, as well as a reduction in the properties carbon footprint.